Crater Lake

by James Axler

  Despite all, it was unmistakably the face of a woman, pleading silently for mercy.

  Ryan didn't hesitate, chopping with the edge of his hand across the front of the throat and crushing the delicate electronic implant. His hand also pulped the thyroid cartilage and crushed the laryngeal branch of the vital vagus nerve.

  The sec guard was dying, sliding forward on the floor of the corridor on her face, arms and legs moving spasmodically, gloved fingers scraping feebly.

  Ryan glanced around to make sure the killing had been done out of sight of the watchful vid cameras. Jak turned the power control dial of the gun all the way around to the upper limit of twenty.

  "Finn swears those blasters don't work ninety-nine times out of a hundred," Ryan said. "So watch yourself."

  "Why we moving?" the boy asked.

  Ryan quickly explained everything Doc Tanner had found out the previous evening, adding that they now knew the scientists were intending to start their physiological experiments on the white-haired boy that very day.

  "And we don't think the bastards intended you to be up and walking after they've done. Termination mode for you, kid."

  "So we blow 'em?"

  Ryan grinned wolfishly. "Clean out the nest, Jak. What we're good at."

  IT WAS CLOSE to B in amber when Ryan and Jak finally arrived safely back at the dormitory. One good thing about the vast research sections of the complex being sealed off from them was that the scientists seemed to rarely move anywhere else, having most of their living and eating quarters near their precious work.

  Twice they'd seen sec patrols, but they'd been absurdly easy to dodge. More and more Ryan had come to realize that the Wizard Island complex was like a security sieve. When it had first been established, it had probably been the last word in tightness, but over the years it had fallen apart. The research had taken priority, and there had never been any threats to the scientists from outside.

  Everyone in the dormitory was ready and primed. Doc had recovered from the alcoholic excesses of the night before and looked chipper. The first priority was to get hold of some weapons, and the blaster Jak and Ryan had won was a start. J.B. had made the suggestion at their battle meeting that they should try to get their clothes and weapons back. That way they would fight better and be ready to make a swift run for it. At no time during their brief discussions had anyone suggested the possibility they might fail.

  If you succeeded, it wouldn't arise.

  And if you didn't, then it wasn't going to matter much.

  "When shall we start?" Krysty asked now, sitting cross-legged on her bed, doing slow-breathing exercises to ready herself for the coming combat.

  "Now's good as any time. Who wants to take this laser blaster?"

  Finn grinned at Ryan's question. "Have to be me. I'm the man with blasters. Don't have many skills, but I fucking know 'bout blasters. Gimme, Ryan."

  He caught the short, vicious gun, then dropped into a fighter's crouch, pretending to spray the room with the lethal blue beam. In the laughter, none of them heard the warning sound of the main door hissing open.

  "M-m-m-m-my suspicions were in affirmative m-m-m-m-mode," Dr. Avian said. He stood there, a malevolent smile of triumph on his face.

  He was flanked by four armed sec men.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  "CAREFUL, FINN," Ryan Cawdor said quietly, not wanting to provoke the rotund man into any action that might leave them dead within seconds. Whatever Finnegan might say about the fallibility of the laser rifles, it figured they had to work sometime. With four of the sec men, it was too long a shot.

  "I trust you have recovered from the peculiar illness of last night," Doc Tanner said, offering a half bow to the limping scientist.

  "Poison, Dr. Tanner. Poison." With an obvious effort, the man was controlling his stammer, speaking slowly and with great care.

  "Poison, sir? That is an aspersion upon my honor! By the three Kennedys, my seconds shall be calling upon you."

  Ryan had no idea at all what Doc Tanner was rambling about. Neither, obviously, did Dr. Avian. The scientist waved a threatening plas-hand at them all.

  "You t-t-t-try to betray us all."

  "What're you going to do 'bout it?" J.B. asked. "Take us in?"

  Dr. Avian looked bewildered, as though he hadn't actually thought the confrontation through. Without any sign from Ryan, the others had spread slowly into a half circle, leaving a scattered target for the blasters, each one waiting for a sign from Ryan to make a move.

  Only at that moment did the crippled scientist notice Finnegan was holding one of the sec guard's blasters.

  "Where d-d-d-did you… And the white head is free from the…"

  In any firefight there is a crucial moment when the situation goes beyond words. If the moment is recognized, then there is a chance of staying alive. Missing it kills a man deader than chicken-fried steak.

  Ryan knew the moment had come.

  "Chill the gimp," he told Finnegan in an ordinary kind of tone, the way you'd ask someone to open a window for you.

  Finn aimed the blaster and squeezed the trigger. The weapon spluttered and fired a brief burst of blue-green light. The scientist squealed and staggered back, the front of his coat scorched and smoldering. Finnegan threw the useless gun on the floor.

  "What a fucker!" he spat.

  Already, Ryan and the others were moving in on the sec men. During the brief stay on Wizard Island, Ryan had come to suspect that the guards operated with virtually no free will at all, performing their patrols and chores by a simple programmed rote. Anything above and beyond that had to come from a specific order from one of the scientists.

  That was a key factor in his risking an attack.

  Unlike the unreliable blasters, it worked.

  Not one of the mutie guards tried to defend themselves against the attack. While Dr. Avian rolled around on the floor, stammering cries for assistance, the sec men went down like helpless tenpins. Ryan broke the neck of the nearest. J.B. kicked the next one in the crotch, felling him, then did a jump and knee drop on the center of his chest. The crack of snapping ribs was obscenely loud in the silence of the fight. None of the sec men even cried out as they went down one after the other.

  Jak chopped the legs from the third sec man, leaving Krysty to straddle the creature, her long, strong fingers tightening around the exposed neck. The helmet rolled away, and the idiot face goggled up at her, eyes rolling, mouth opening. The hand made a feeble effort to move the woman, but Krysty was too strong and too experienced. Her strangling fingers clamped around the windpipe. The eyes protruded even more, and the tongue, blackening, burst from the bloody froth that filled the mouth.

  Finnegan hit the fourth and last sec man, taking out his anger and frustration at the failure of the laser gun. He was about as tall as the black-uniformed figure, but outweighed him by around sixty pounds. He sent the creature crashing back into the edge of the door with a spine-jarring impact. The guard's gun went flying one way, his helmet spinning the other. As the mutie began to topple, Finn hooked two fingers into his brutish nostrils, jerking the sec man off-balance even more. With amazing lightness for a big man, he pivoted sideways and struck with his forearm across the front of the mutie's neck. Unable to breathe, the guard slumped to his knees, face purpling, waving his hands helplessly in the air. Finnegan, with contemptuous ease, stepped behind the sec man and locked his hands under the creature's chin. Bracing himself like someone pulling a cork from an enormous bottle, inhaling mightily with the effort, he snapped the sec man's neck like a dry branch.

  "Four down and done," J.B. said, picking up one of the laser blasters and examining the dubious firing mechanism.

  "T-t-t-t-t-termination with utter p-p-p-prejudice," Dr. Avian gasped, reaching for the tiny trans-speak that hung from the top pocket of his long coat.

  "Not us, Doc, you," Ryan said, stooping to snatch the tiny transmitter and crush it under his heel.

  "You wouldn't kill a man of sc
ience? It is b-b-b-beyond logic."

  "Chill him, Ryan," Doc Tanner said, face cold as sierra granite.

  "You are a colleague," Dr. Avian whimpered, still lying on his back and waving his artificial hand.

  "Colleague," Doc Tanner hissed. "I would as soon claim kinship with a diseased timber wolf. A scientist should labor only for betterment and for peace and for life. For the positive things. No man knows that as well as I do. You and your crawling, loathsome colleagues are working only for the powers of darkness. For the black lords of chaos. No, Dr. Avian, you should be crushed like a poisonous worm. Kill him, Ryan. Quickly, so that we can get on with our cleansing business."

  Ryan had never seen the old man so angered. He seemed to grow in stature, his eyes blazing with a menacing fire, his fists clenched at his side.

  "I'll ice him, Doc," Finnegan said, glancing at Ryan for confirmation.

  "Do it," Ryan said.

  It was so simple for an experienced killer like Finnegan to take out the frail scientist. In the brief struggle, the false hand became detached and began to make its own laborious way across the floor, trailing wires and a green circuit board behind it. As it neared the door, Lori followed it and set her foot on top of it. There was the tiny crackling sound of shorting circuits, and the hand was still.

  J.B. broke the sudden silence. "These guns are totally U.S. All of 'em."

  Lori turned to the Armorer. "What is that meaning?"

  "Unserviceable," J.B. replied, dropping the blaster on the bed. "For once Finnegan's right. Odds must be hundred to one on them working. They're fine at low power but fucking useless if you push the dial around."

  "What now?" Jak Lauren asked.

  "We go get our own weapons," Ryan replied. "And our clothes."

  "And if we meet trouble?" Krysty asked, shifting her stance to avoid the spreading pool of blood that oozed stickily from the open mouth of one of the dead sec men.

  "We've taken four. We can take the rest."

  THE CORRIDORS WERE EMPTY when they made their move.

  Now that they were irreversibly committed to a course of bloody action, there was no point in concealment. No point in anything except speed.

  "Place they stored our stuff's around the next corner," J.B. called, holding his handmade map of the complex.

  In his other hand he held one of the blasters; he, Ryan, Finn, Jak and Krysty had each taken one. Despite Finnegan's lack of confidence in the weapons, and the evidence of their own eyes, they were better than nothing. At the suggestion of the Armorer they set the illuminated pointer on ten rather than maximum power.

  "Take a look, kid," J.B. said, motioning for Jak to sneak ahead of them.

  The boy flattened himself against the wall of the corridor, brushing his mane of snowy hair away from his eyes. He cautiously edged his face around the corner, then pulled back sharply.

  "Nobody," he said, grinning.

  The storage room door was sturdier than many others around the complex, but it yielded to a succession of crushing kicks from Finnegan's right foot. The hinges squealed and finally split, and the door burst open, revealing shelves and lockers.

  "Let's get ready, people," J.B. said, leading them inside.

  Jak waited in the corridor, keeping watch for sec patrols while the others quickly found their own clothes, tore off their coveralls and changed. They also found their own weapons—a far more important discovery.

  "Let's fucking go take 'em," Finnegan said, waving his HK54A2 submachine gun. The big butcher's cleaver in its leather sheath dangled menacingly at his left hip, balanced by the 9 mm Beretta pistol on his right hip.

  Jak carefully checked his satin-finish .357 Magnum, peering along the six-inch barrel at one of the overhead lights. Slowly he reloaded it, not taking any chances that someone had tampered with the heavy pistol.

  Doc Tanner swung his sword stick, the thin steel blade hissing and whistling as he cut and parried like a fencing scarecrow, shuffling and dancing, muttering to himself from some archaic guide to fighting.

  "Punto and reverse, stoccata and imbroccata. Passada. Parry and lunge. By the three Kennedys, but we'll purge this place, my friends."

  Ryan held up a hand for silence. "We've been lucky so far. Let's realize that. Seems these people are too damned busy with their experiments and research to watch what's going on. But there's still a chance that someone might look at the security vid screens. So we still move quick and quiet. And from now on we take out anything and anyone we see."

  "Main thing's to get in and find what we can use to blow this mother a mile into the sky," the Armorer said. "We'll have to string out a little."

  "Yeah," Ryan agreed. "I'll go point. Krysty second. Then Jak, Doc 'n Lori, with you and Finn holding the rear. From now on there's no stopping. The security in this section is old and all fucked up. Once we reach the research sections, I guess it'll be harder."

  J.B. gave directions from his map as they moved toward the core of the complex. Each person had a favored blaster in hand, ready for instant fire. It was one of those situations, as Doc had pointed out a couple of minutes earlier, when those that weren't for 'em were ag'in 'em.

  There was no danger of accidentally shooting down a friend.

  There were no friends.

  Just then two helmeted mutie guards stepped simultaneously from a side corridor only thirty short paces in front of Ryan. Standing close together, they began to turn slowly and awkwardly.

  The caseless G-12 was already at Ryan's hip. He took lightning aim, leveling and squeezing, bracing himself even though the H&K automatic rifle was virtually without recoil. It was set on triple burst, the three bullets so close together they sounded like a single round.

  Ryan squeezed the trigger twice, shifting his aim slightly from one sec man to the other. The two corpses slid and kicked on the blood-slick tiles of the corridor.

  "Nice," Jak said, just behind Ryan.

  The sec man on the right had been hit by all three rounds in the center of his chest, five inches below the thorax, the bullets within a finger's width of one another. The force of the impact had lifted the mutie clean off his feet, hurling him backward. Another three rounds, again tightly grouped, had hit the second guard a touch higher, knocking him sideways, his helmet rattling and spinning, still rolling after both sentries were dead.

  As the seven began to move on, the loudspeaker above them crackled to life. "Sec report terminal malfunction? Query intruders? Report? Report?"

  Somewhere behind them, apparently at some distance, a siren began to wail. The lights above them flickered. Ahead, a door was slammed shut.

  "Chill's on," Finnegan muttered.

  "Let's go," Ryan said.

  Moving quickly but with stealth, they approached the nearest entrance to the research section, which was just around the next turn. Oddly the screeching siren had stopped.

  Suddenly around the corner came the two pretty young women they'd seen on the day of their arrival at Wizard Island—Louella Hall and Angie Pflaug. A sec man walked behind them, carrying cleaning tools, ready for the two blue-eyed blond girls to have an antisocial accident.

  "Central be with you," Dr. Pflaug said, already starting to giggle at the sight of Jak's bleached hair.

  "White head was for anthrax-derivative testing at C in amber," Dr. Hall said, her fingers working nervously at the collar of her cherry-red lab coat. "Why with you? And uniformwise unorthodoxy?"

  Ryan had the ruthless instincts of the true killer, but even he hesitated at chilling these poor, mentally deprived girls. They were merely victims of a crazed policy of research and inbreeding.

  "Terminate them all," Dr. Pflaug said, hardly able to speak to the sec guard due to her rising laughter.

  "They're mine," Jak said.

  And they were.

  Ryan admired the careful way the fourteen-year-old braced his right hand with his left, steadying the heavy pistol against the inevitable kick. The boom of the shots was deafening in the narrow corridor.<
br />
  The first bullet pierced the front of the guard's helmet, carrying splinters of black plastic with it into pulpy brain tissue. Blood spurted all over the cream colored walls. For a moment, as the powder smoke drifted around them, the two young scientists continued to snigger, holding onto each other, their laughter as bright and tinkling as drops of crystal.

  The double crack of the big Magnum drowned out their chuckles.

  One bullet went through the neck of Dr. Angie Pflaug, sending a torrent of blood gouting from the burst artery, patterning the ceiling in cherry-red splashes.

  One bullet went through the open, laughing mouth of Dr. Louella Hall, exiting at an angle three fingers above her right ear and tearing away a clump of summer-wheat hair and a chunk of bone the size of a man's fist. The force of the impact sucked out most of the woman's diseased, distorted brain.

  "It's a good beginning," Doc Tanner said quietly.

  The sirens started up again, wailing and shrieking, the pitch rising and falling.

  And rising and falling once more.

  Ryan was beginning to think it was almost like some lunatic dream. They were moving through this redoubt, buried deep under the waters of Crater Lake, in what had once been the beautiful state of Oregon. They were killing security men in handfuls, even wiping out the protected scientists.

  And there was no comeback.

  ONLY ONE SEC MAN GUARDED the main entrance as the seven friends came within sight of it. His back was turned, a laser rifle slung across his black-clad shoulder. The dark mirrored visor stared blankly away from them, toward a moving pattern of colored lights that danced over the top of the door. Near him was a sign that read, Absolutely No Admittance Without Authorization and Accreditation.

  "That one's fucking mine," Finnegan hissed, baring his teeth delightedly at such an easy target.

  At that moment the speakers around them clicked to life. "All security operatives go to condition red. Repeat condition red. Weapons into full termination mode. Repeat condition red. Any person without clearance to be eradicated without warning. Condition red."